Liah Greenfeld is Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Anthropology at Boston University, and Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. She is the author of Mind, Modernity, Madness: The Impact of Culture on Human Experience (Harvard University Press, 2013), Nation…read more

Comments

Liah made too many assumptions:1) She assumes that Tsarnaev brothers are both mentally ill but there is not a single media report indicating any illness.

2) Nationalism cannot be cause of mental illness. Genetics play a big role in mental illness. Social Env. can make bad situation worse but nationalism is not the only factor effecting social env. Read more

I would like to challenge the opinion of the writer, giving it a twist based on the following 2 paragraphs:

"...Nationalist principles emphasize the self-governing individual, including the right to choose one’s social position and identity. But this liberty, empowering and encouraging the individual to choose what to be, complicates identity formation...""...That is why the most open and freest society today, the Unites States, leads the world in rates of severe mental disease – supplanting England, yesterday’s freest and most open society. Indeed, foreigners at one time considered madness “the English malady.”..."

Maybe this was the ideal when nationalism was formed 500 years ago in England, but the above statement about nationalism, "self governing individual", "social mobility" has never been true for England and the US and it is even less true today.The English "class system" is as strong as ever, and the growing social inequality in the US and many other "free and democratic" nations make social mobility practically impossible.Perhaps the huge discrepancy between the hoped for, promised freedom and the actual reality, where people are not free at all, but are completely operated by the profit oriented consumer society is causing tensions, or even "madness"?Unfortunately as the crisis is deepening, and as especially young people have no future prospects due to astonishing youth unemployment, it will be easier and more likely that they can be recruited to extremist movements, violence, regardless of original culture, religion or social status.The only solution would be a truly open and free human society, adapting to the global and integral conditions we find ourselves today, a completely new education system teaching youth how to develop and survive in today's environment creating positive human connections in our interconnected and interdependent network.And of course as a foundation we need a different, mutually responsible and complementing, fair socio-economic system changing our very much layered, unequal communities. Read more

Professor Greenfeld sounds like a reactionary. The incidence of madness is high in Western societies because mental illness is less likely to be stigmatized there. And uniformity of identity is certainly not an indication of sanity. It is - as it was in Ireland until quite recently - symptomatic of a national malaise, of a mania for sameness that deforms minds far more insidiously than democracy does. If women did not appear to go mad in large numbers when the Catholic Church held dear auld Ireland in its benevolent grip, it was only because their cries were studiously ignored, shouted down by their husbands at home or confined to the darkness of the confession box. Is Professor Greenfeld seriously suggesting that those women were silent (ie, sane) because they were happy, well-adjusted Catholics?

Pre-nationalist Ireland was a far more violent place than it is now, even if the incidence of madness is climbing. Pre-modern societies were brutal and repressive places; their religious orders did not 'orient' people, they schooled them, drilled them, and damned them when they stepped out of line. Modernity opened a window into peoples' souls. It found many of them already deeply disturbed, and their religious instructors were largely to blame.

Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev didn't terrorize the people of Boston because they were mad or disoriented or forced by the vote into violent protest. They did it because they were battered and brutalized by a family of thugs that punched them senseless on a weekly basis. Had they stayed in Dagestan, they would have found culturally appropriate ways to vent their resulting rage, either by beating their own wives and children, or by joining a religious order. That is, they would have become model Dagestani citizens by battering their nearest and dearest or by imprisoning themselves. In America, the Tsarnaev brothers were free to express themselves in any way they liked. But when they decide to speak, they found they had only one thing to say. What a shame they didn't join the rationally insane and avail of the help they needed.

The answer does lie in Dagestan after all. The Irish know that, because they've been there too. Read more

I clicked on Ms. Greenfeld's article out of curiosity: what could England of 500 years ago possibly have to do with the Tsarnaev brothers' terrible act. Reading her essay was one of those wonderful moments of revelation. Without being able to articulate it, I have long thought that a sense of identity plays an undervalued role in the successful adaptation of the individual. The well-adapted take for granted their sense of place, of family, of personal history. Many who grow in the world without the benefit of those qualities are so focused on trying to overcome their mental afflictions that they never make the connection. It has seemed to me that the Tsarnaev's destructive actions had far more to do with their lack of purchase in this world (immigrants without a sense of place or history, abandoned by their parents and cousins) than with a commitment to some Islamic cause. I thank Ms. Greenfeld for explaining this phenomenon so succintly. Read more

It sounds like Prof Greenfield's model of a free, nationalist society has succeeded in replacing the rigid systematics of pre-nationalistic thinking with a rigid modernist rationalistic framework. In this worldview, individuals like the Tsarnaevs are necessarily delusional since their form of rationality runs counter to the dominant forms within the culture. Greenfield's belief that "a clear sense of identity is a necessary condition for adequate mental functioning" is consistent with this worldview and makes it difficult for her to imagine that beyond a certain phase of nationalism, the freer a society becomes, the less violence it is liable to be (witness the dramatic drop in crime rates across the U.S. over the past 30 years). Read more

This is an interesting hypothesis. It seems to imply that madness has reached epidemic proportions in the Islamic world and lesser degrees among strict adherents of the other Abrahamic religions. If that is so, what is the remedy?

In her recent book The Silk Road, Professor Valerie Hansen reports that the Tang Dynasty banned religion in 845, wiping out early Christianity in China. (Buddhism was banned too but survived.) Apparently religion and nationalism have been in conflict for more than 500 years. Read more

You have a good point about the relationship between terrorism and nationalism, and even about what might appear as the mad methods of terrorists. But you go too far in your discussion of mental illness generally, running counter to all the recent research on the biochemical and genetic underpinnings of much mental illness. A genetic predisposition to produce too little serotonin, for example, has nothing to do with nationalism. Read more

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